Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult
Bohumil Hrabal
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Thus this book is an expression not only of my own evolution, but of a part of society’s evolution as well, a society I live in and that, like me, wishes to live in habitations where humor and the possibility of metaphysical escape reign supreme. BOHUMIL HRABAL, 1965”
“You can't live without cracks in the brain. You can't rid yourself of freedom the way you'd rid yourself of lice.”
“This new age is melting you all down, because it's not the measles you've come down with, it's the epoch.”
“The stories in this collection represent the early results of Hrabal’s discovery of what he came to call “total realism,” the realization that the ordinary events of everyday life can be as magical as surrealism, and that straightforward accounts of people at work and in conversation can reveal more about who they are and the world they live in than attempts to portray their inner lives.”
“Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.”
“Once, for three hundred crowns, I became a saint for an instant: I bought up all the goldfinches, then released them from my hand. Oh, what a feeling when a terrified little bird flies from your palm to freedom!”
“Life, strangely enough, is constantly being reinvented, and loved, even though a tinfoil brain will bring forth crumpled images, and a trampled torso will ooze misery. And yet, it is still a beautiful thing when a man abandons his three square meals a day and his adding machine and his family and goes off to follow a beautiful star. Life is still magnificent as long as one maintains the illusion that an entire world can be conjured from a tiny patch of earth.”
“Life is fidelity to the beauty exploding all around us, even, at times, at the cost of our own lives.”
“I was in harmony with everything and I was saved, too, but lost in a way as well... but I think this will probably be my salvation...”
“From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers' table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.”
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Book Keywords:
salvation, writing, beauty, memory, animals, lost, unhabitual, sacrifice, sainthood, labor, history, life, stalinism, paradox, language, freedom, transendentalism, revolution, hypocrisy, mythology
